YEAR 7 SABBATICAL

A thoughtfully-considered rest. Full details below.

2 MAY 2019

AFTER STARTING OUR COMPANY FROM SCRATCH, the Bridge Rep team and I are wrapping up a sixth exciting year of playmaking. To every creative team member, patron, donor, Board member, and supporter: thank you for being a part of our journey thus far. Together, we’ve staged dozens of productions and events, created hundreds of opportunities for a diverse contingency of theater-makers, and served thousands of patrons, often at a highly or fully subsidized ticket price. Well done!

Our last twelve months have, in many ways, been our most successful. We took on two world premieres — Dark Room and Who Is Eartha Mae? — which featured stellar creative teams, achieved record attendance, enjoyed our most sophisticated production support to date, and are now nominated for four Elliot Norton Awards. As we look forward to 2019-2020, then, it may come as a surprise that we’ve decided to take a sabbatical for our Year 7. In the spirit of transparency, we want to share the confluence of behind-the-scenes factors guiding our thought process.

First, the tough stuff: in negotiating what would be our fourth year at the Multicultural Arts Center, we brought forward grievances about the venue’s governance, submitting statements from parties who have worked both with and outside of Bridge Rep to corroborate our concerns. Even so, the Board of Directors of the Multicultural Arts Center informed us they have full confidence in the Executive Director and current practices. We did not move forward with negotiations, and have removed ourselves effective immediately from what we experience as an untenable work environment. At this point in the calendar year, it is too late to responsibly program and support a lineup of work for 2019-2020, especially in light of having to find a new home in a region where rehearsal and performance space is scarce. While we have treasured the opportunity to create theater at what should be a very special venue, and the disintegration of the relationship with the Multicultural Arts Center is a deeply felt loss, we are relieved to have summoned the courage to speak truth to power in our corner of Greater Boston’s fragile arts ecosystem.

Because we have developed close relationships with many of our collaborators, patrons, and supporters, we want to share personal news, too: in the last twelve months, Associate Producer John Tracey and I have each relocated in order to invest in starter-homes with our spouses. He and his husband have moved to Providence, while my wife and I have migrated to Worcester. While John and I still work in Greater Boston, we need time and space to figure out how we can move Bridge Rep forward while balancing our family lives, our new geography, and our income-earning jobs. Indeed, we continue to run Bridge Rep on a fully volunteer basis, having opted to increase creative team fees each year instead of ever paying ourselves, as the massive resources needed to produce live theatre remain out of balance with the public and private funding we’re able to secure on an annual basis.

Fortunately, we’ve never defined Bridge Rep in terms of a specific space, or a specific season model run on a specific timeline. Instead, we’ve defined ourselves in terms of our mission to create connections between people and communities through intimate, engaging, theatrical events. As we’ve evolved, we’ve also developed a keen ability to adapt to shifting circumstances, while marching steadily toward a value system that prizes quality of work over quantity of work. These principles are alive and well in our hearts and minds, have influenced our decision to step back for 2019-2020, and will chart our path forward. As we had originally planned for Year 7 programming, the funds already raised are ready and waiting to support a production upon our return.

All in all, we are confident in and very much at peace with the decision to take a year sabbatical. To our village, thank you in advance for supporting this well-earned and thoughtfully-considered rest. Should you have questions or comments, please feel free to reach out any time. In the near future, we look forward to celebrating the achievements of Bridge Rep’s creative teams and the entire theater community at the Elliot Norton Awards. Then, we’ll clean out our storage at the Arts Center. We’ll walk our dogs and hang out with our spouses. We’ll daydream. We’ll trust. We’ll brainstorm. And we’ll see you at the theatre.